Is all the beekeeping, baking and leatherwork just escapist fantasy or the start of a radically human approach to work?

by Joshua Habgood-Coote  BIO

In the workshop of the artisan shoemaker Gabriele Gmeiner, in Venice, Italy. Photo by Stefano Tripodi/REDA/UIG/Getty Images

is a lecturer in philosophy of language in the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds in the UK.

Edited byCameron Allan McKean

In the 18th century, the streets of East London were filled with flowers. Fuchsias, auriculas and star-of-Bethlehem grew from the window boxes of tall terraced houses. And tulips and dahlias sprouted from the narrow allotments kept by local silk weavers, who often tended to their gardens on Mondays. But as mechanical looms took over, and the weavers were forced to work long hours in factories to earn a living, there was little time left for growing flowers.

In 1795, John Thelwall, the son of a silk mercer, wrote about his memories of the weavers’ gardens:

I remember the time, myself, when a man who was a tolerable workman in the fields, had generally, beside the apartment in which he carried on his vocation, a small summer house and a narrow slip of a garden, at the outskirts of the town, where he spent his Monday, either in flying his pidgeons, or raising his tulips. But those gardens are now fallen into decay. The little summer-house and the Monday’s recreation are no more; and you will find the poor weavers and their families crowded together in vile, filthy and unwholesome chambers, destitute of the most common comforts, and even of the common necessaries of life.

Like many others, Thelwall was nostalgic for a lost way of life. The historian E P Thompson notes that almost all writing about cloth workers in the 19th century is ‘haunted by the legend of better days’. And, like many others, Thelwall used the flowers that artisans had grown (and then woven into their patterns) as a symbol of that loss. ‘Weavers,’ the historian Robin Veder writes, ‘mourned the flowers as stand-ins for lost artisanal work culture.’ We might say that Thelwall was in the grip of skill nostalgia.

East London, detail from John Rocque’s 1746 map. Courtesy Wikipedia

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Today, we seem to be caught by the same emotion. Streaming sites are full of reality television shows in which people compete to learn new skills: baking, pottery, sewing, glassblowing, blacksmithing. Etsy, an online marketplace built around handmade and vintage goods, now has more than 5 million sellers. A version of the 19th-century whaling song ‘The Wellerman’ has been viewed by hundreds of millions of people on TikTok and YouTube – a work song for people with neither ship nor crew. The French worker’s jacket, bleu de travail, is now sold by luxury fashion houses to people who will never set foot on a factory floor. We dream of running away to work on a farm or living the life of a Mediterranean peasant (ie, ‘Nonnamaxxing’). The American philosopher Matthew Crawford – who left his job at a think tank to open a motorcycle repair shop – wrote a bestselling book about this kind of transition, called Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009), in which he argues that skilled manual work gives access to a form of thinking that office work denies us.

These desires are growing ever more acute as AI promises, or threatens, to automate yet another layer of what humans can do. We crave the handmade, the from-scratch, the traditional, the folk. We dream of old forms of skilled work.

When we fetishise the skills of the past, are we falling into a reactionary form of Luddism that resists all change?

But nostalgia can be a complicated and problematic emotion. For one thing, it is characteristically detached from reality. Fond memories of London’s weavers and their flowers make it easier to overlook the problems with artisanal silk production, and the fact that there were still gardens in Spitalfields until the mid-19th century. An equally serious concern is that nostalgia channels discontent about the present into the project of recreating an imagined past. As the cultural theorist Svetlana Boym argues in The Future of Nostalgia (2001), unreflective nostalgia ‘breeds monsters’: nationalism, racial supremacy, fascism.

Will our desire for a lost age of skilled work curdle into technophobia, a distrust of social change, and a desire to return to the ‘way things were’? When we fetishise the skills and objects of the past, are we falling into a reactionary form of Luddism that resists all change? What are the politics hidden within our desire for artisanal sourdough bread and hand-thrown pottery?

We are not the first to confront these questions. More than a century ago, sickened by the factories and slums that mechanical looms had built, John Ruskin and William Morris looked back, reaching past the Spitalfields weaver to something older: the medieval artisan. There, they found a dream of skilled labour, which they used as a tool to indict the present and imagine a fairer future.

Their skill nostalgia became radical. Could ours do the same?

The A G Hendy Home Store in Hastings, UK, 2015. Courtesy John Blower/Flickr

Anxieties about the way we work are much older than the factories that worried Morris and Ruskin. For more than two millennia, philosophers have argued that skills are worth defending, and that we lose something of ourselves when we let them go.

In Plato’s Phaedrus dialogue, written around 370 BCE, Socrates relates an Egyptian story about the invention of writing by the God Thoth. In the tale, Thoth makes his case for this new technology to the Egyptian king Thamus. After the divine sales pitch, Thamus responds:

[T]his discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.

In Plato’s telling, Socrates sides with Thamus on the basis that writing produces only a simulation of intelligence. Written texts are fixed, whereas conversation requires speakers to exercise flexibility, responding to questions and adapting to listeners. Plato views this responsiveness as characteristic of wisdom. There is a suggestion here that genuine understanding is produced through flexible give-and-take, and that reliance on writing threatens this by fostering forgetfulness and the mere appearance of knowledge. In some ways, this story suggests that flexible conversation could be understood as a skill – one that might be threatened if the technology of writing were to become widespread.

The shift to industrial manufacturing destroys the tacit knowledge tied up in the creation of handmade goods

Roughly 21 centuries later, in Émile (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau argues that apprenticeship in a métier – a job or........

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